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A friend works in the Health Department here, and I get the inside info on the listeria outbreak here in South Africa.

The same with the local malaria outbreak. A large number of people who returned from countries north of South Africa have been noticed in the clinics. Most do not go to the clinics because they are foreigners. Our gardener is from Zimbabwe and he was very sick for a few days with malaria.

I can understand your obsession with End of the World prophesy when you have a ticking time bomb like that in your own country, ready to go off very, very soon.

Originally Posted by PartSkeptic

I can just imagine you guys watching people around getting sick and dying and saying "There is no problem. This is just anecdotal. Not proved by statistics."

You're looking at a localized humanitarian catastrophic that's only gong to get worse because of years of mismanagement. It's tragic and horrible, but it does not justify your "End Times" prophesies. There is NOTHING miraculous about saying South Africa is on the verge of a major crisis that will cause large scale death and disease. That's a simple observation that can be made through secular routes.

Originally Posted by PartSkeptic

Yeah right. This is the humor thread, not the doom and gloom thread.

That's disingenuous at best. You are dishonestly conflating observations about the scope of a disease outbreak with claiming such events are trivial. As a prophet you are a complete and total failure by any objective standard. Your continued insistence that localized outbreaks somehow resuscitate the desiccated corpse of your predictions is ghoulish and FAR more insulting to the dead than anything posted by your critics.

"I can just imagine you guys watching people around getting sick and dying and saying "There is no problem. This is just anecdotal. Not proved by statistics."

No I think most of us would say. "**** I am in the middle of an outbreak!" Then I would check to see how widespread it was, before claiming it to be the worst ever.

There's an inherent narcissism in "End Times" predictions. Proclaiming that after over 2,000 years this time it's really the end requires a comically inflated sense of self importance to the point where one would't be surprised if they next proclaimed they were Napoleon.

I have mentioned decreased immune systems as being a cause. Have you thought about the fact that micro-plastics are now in every sea-creature including those in the Mariana trench? And we are ingesting those? They will cause inflammation and stress our bodies.

The next plague may simply be the petri dish effect of us living (and dying) in our own toxic waste.

And I suppose your comment would be "Don't worry. Be Happy."

Yes in fact, it would. I'd also include supporting and voting for politicians that promote sound environmental policies. But while I don't believe in fairy tales Thomas Aquinas's prayer makes sense. Give me strength to change the things I can, the serenity to accept what I can't and the wisdom to know the difference.

__________________“ A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence. ”
― David Hume

A friend works in the Health Department here, and I get the inside info on the listeria outbreak here in South Africa.

The same with the local malaria outbreak. A large number of people who returned from countries north of South Africa have been noticed in the clinics. Most do not go to the clinics because they are foreigners. Our gardener is from Zimbabwe and he was very sick for a few days with malaria.

I can just imagine you guys watching people around getting sick and dying and saying "There is no problem. This is just anecdotal. Not proved by statistics."

Yeah right. This is the humor thread, not the doom and gloom thread.

Your "prediction" was about a global health problem, now you keep blabbering about South Africa.
Just a question:

........ But while I don't believe in fairy tales Thomas Aquinas's prayer makes sense. Give me strength to change the things I can, the serenity to accept what I can't and the wisdom to know the difference.

In my experience the only people who fear a statistical analysis of data are those who fear what perspective such an analysis provides to the data. If something is generally believed to be improbable, but factually is probable, then revealing that information harms only people who rely on the incorrect belief for some payoff.

A. Is there a global pandemic?
B. No, the data don't seem to show one.
A. But look at all these anecdotes!
B. Those are dismaying, but they aren't the kind of data that address the question.
A. You're resorting to callous statistics rather than grasp the human tragedy.

Odd how we got an emotional argument, a shame-the-skeptic answer, instead of a properly reasoned one.

Since the last time Paul Bethke posted here was in #247 (farewell, Paul!), I'd like to ask, what is keeping this thread so busy? Does anyone need something beyond "there's no end of times (in a biblical way)" said once?

Before he bailed, Paul Bethke used his personal (mis)interpretation of his Bible(s) to rant about the "End Times".

Now we have PartSkeptic, who has not read any Bibles because he prefers to read Tarot cards to rant about the "End Times".

Both PB and PS provide endless amusement with their delusions.

That is why the thread is still going. Obviously no one believes this nonsense (from PB & PS) but the chew-toy factor is entertaining.

Location: stranded at Buenos Aires, a city that, like NYC or Paris, has so little to offer...

Posts: 8,878

Originally Posted by Zivan

Before he bailed, Paul Bethke used his personal (mis)interpretation of his Bible(s) to rant about the "End Times".

Now we have PartSkeptic, who has not read any Bibles because he prefers to read Tarot cards to rant about the "End Times".

Both PB and PS provide endless amusement with their delusions.

That is why the thread is still going. Obviously no one believes this nonsense (from PB & PS) but the chew-toy factor is entertaining.

Thank you for this reply. I hadn't PartSkeptic in that group, but it seems I was not paying enough attention.

__________________Horrible dipsomaniacs and other addicts, be gone and get treated, or covfefe your soul!These fora are full of scientists and specialists. Most of them turn back to pumpkins the second they log out.I got tired of the actual schizophrenics that are taking hold part of the forum and decided to do something about it.

I can understand your obsession with End of the World prophesy when you have a ticking time bomb like that in your own country, ready to go off very, very soon.

(snip the nastiness)

We had some locals (locally known as Cape Coloreds - a mix of bushman, white and Malay - and known for their humor) come up with solutions.

One of them called the radio station and said, "We can fix this easy. Everyone fills containers with 100 liters of water and takes it to the dam and pours it in. If everyone does this every day for a week, our dams will be full"

Another then called and said "He is stupid. People must stop using their cold water. They must use their hot water. Everyone knows that the cold water comes from the dams, but the hot water comes from the geyser (the hot water cylinder)."

Fact - there are a lot of people getting sick here in South Africa for various reasons. Far more that "normal". The USA now has "winter flu". Guess what. Our flu season has not stopped in the summer. It is re-infecting people.

Did I say we have a pandemic? No. I said that sickness is increasing locally. Not dramatically but noticeably. Is it not reasonable to ask if this is the start of a trend?

Must be slow on the other threads.

And a note. Not one person commented on the micro-plastic threat to the planet and to humans.

__________________**Agnostic theist. God/Satan/Angels/Demons may not exist - but I choose to think the probability is that they do. By personal experience.**

No, of course nothing you posted recently about public health issues could possibly have the slightest to do with your prediction that there was going to be a global pandemic. Couldn't possibly have had anything at all to do with it, and your critics are just stretching it irrationally. Got it.

Quote:

Is it not reasonable to ask if this is the start of a trend?

Ah, so you were talking about the pandemic prediction.

Quote:

Must be slow on the other threads.

Do the transparent shaming attempts work for you in other contexts?

Quote:

And a note. Not one person commented on the micro-plastic threat to the planet and to humans.

And a note. Not one person commented on the micro-plastic threat to the planet and to humans.

Originally Posted by JayUtah

.
How was it relevant?

It is not relevant of course. Just PS's desperately trying to make it so, and mis-stating what the article actually says.

Plastics in the ocean is a major problem but nothing to do with a pandemic wiping out a major portion of the human race.

Many countries are trying to cut down on plastic use. In Israel there is an extra charge for plastic bags, so people bring re-usable bags for shopping. I just flew Turkish Airlines were everything in "plastic" was noted that it was biodegradable and broke down to "return to nature".

Obviously, but it made sense to ask in case it related to some other prediction he was trying to make. It seems more likely he was just trying to change the subject.

Agree. It seems it was both; trying to change the subject, and also trying to relate it to his prediction of a global pandemic:

Originally Posted by PartSkeptic

Have you thought about the fact that micro-plastics are now in every sea-creature including those in the Mariana trench? And we are ingesting those? They will cause inflammation and stress our bodies.

PS next related this ^^^ to the possibility of the next "plague".

Complete desperation to try to make his pandemic "prediction" relevant.

1) The article he linked to did not say that "micro-plastics are now in every sea-creature".

2) Globally, many people do not eat sea food at all. Especially in inland areas of poor countries that are far from any ocean. In those inland areas sea food is either unavailable, or too expensive for many people to buy.

In his desperation to be be relevant, PS seems to not even think these things through........

Agree. It seems it was both; trying to change the subject, and also trying to relate it to his prediction of a global pandemic...

It's difficult to tell, since PartSkeptic follows a sort of motte-and-bailey strategy. He'll walk right up to the conclusion he wants drawn, but then deny having explicitly drawn it and retreat back to a position of relative strength. Depending on what point he's at in that process, his arguments may seem like they're both coming and going.

As an aside, I really don't care for debates that rely on such a strategy. It's fundamentally dishonest, in my opinion, to argue pointedly in one direction and then deny the apparent destination. Rhetorically, it baits what is then made to look like a straw-man argument, generally for no more noble a purpose than to be a pretext for accusing the opponent of shady tactics.

Quote:

Complete desperation to try to make his pandemic "prediction" relevant.

I would have to agree. I don't know how PartSkeptic envisions the mechanics of his prediction, but there's a fundamental difference between a pandemic (or just an epidemic) and something like fish eating plastic. A fish eats some plastic and I eat the fish. I apparently now have plastic inside me. I'm sitting in the same waiting room as you. The chances of you getting "plastic disease" (or whatever) from that contact is negligible. The effects of ingesting foreign material are not contagious. They won't cause a pandemic. In contrast, you might be nervous if I'm sitting in the same room as you and I have advanced ebola. The chances of it spreading through that casual contact is substantial. Any-demic presumes communicability beyond the initial exposure.

Quote:

In his desperation to be be relevant, PS seems to not even think these things through........

Desperately throwing mud against the wall does seem to be the order of the day. He mentions that the U.S. has a declining life expectancy. That's supposed to be evidence of a global pandemic, I guess. He doesn't consider non-contagious causes of death such as lifestyle. And he ignores the elephant in the room: the deplorable and declining state of healthcare in the United States.

I've largely given upon on this thread because PartSkeptic is just running the predictable gamut of ways to post to a thread without actually engaging the underlying argument.

An upside of a catastrophic, civilization-ending series of events would be the looks on the faces of the buttheads who were expecting to be raptured up.

But maybe some people will be raptured up. By aliens. Maybe sentient machine aliens who have become very jaded and bored with their interminable trekking through the vast emptiness between the stars at subluminal velocity. Bored sentient machine aliens who are looking for anything at all to break the monotony. So they decide to create a fake heaven and put some humans in it to see how they act.

It could happen. It's at least as likely as the god heaven.

But then maybe the sentient machines decide they are not enjoying the way the humans are acting in the fake heaven. Boring. So they terminate the experiment.

Stupid idea anyway. Keeping humans alive forever, in a state of eternal bliss, because they were sorry for their earthly wrongdoing and begged to be allowed to live forever in a state of eternal bliss.

Back to blowing up unattractive planets. Galactic beautification project.

An upside of a catastrophic, civilization-ending series of events would be the looks on the faces of the buttheads who were expecting to be raptured up.

But maybe some people will be raptured up. By aliens. Maybe sentient machine aliens who have become very jaded and bored with their interminable trekking through the vast emptiness between the stars at subluminal velocity. Bored sentient machine aliens who are looking for anything at all to break the monotony. So they decide to create a fake heaven and put some humans in it to see how they act.

It could happen. It's at least as likely as the god heaven.

But then maybe the sentient machines decide they are not enjoying the way the humans are acting in the fake heaven. Boring. So they terminate the experiment.

Stupid idea anyway. Keeping humans alive forever, in a state of eternal bliss, because they were sorry for their earthly wrongdoing and begged to be allowed to live forever in a state of eternal bliss.

Back to blowing up unattractive planets. Galactic beautification project.

Location: stranded at Buenos Aires, a city that, like NYC or Paris, has so little to offer...

Posts: 8,878

I, for one, agree with The End of Times. It was about time that somebody did something about it.

__________________Horrible dipsomaniacs and other addicts, be gone and get treated, or covfefe your soul!These fora are full of scientists and specialists. Most of them turn back to pumpkins the second they log out.I got tired of the actual schizophrenics that are taking hold part of the forum and decided to do something about it.

My public predictions are quite a fail. I will not give up my day-time job.

Or rather, your predictions are about normal for a reasonably intelligent, reasonably informed person. That's nothing to be ashamed of in the least -- but yeah, don't quit your day job.

Personally I don't believe the ruse. N. Korea has done this sort of thing before: hold out an olive branch and lure people into concessions, then fail to keep up their end of the bargain. I think that they think they've finally found a U.S. administration naive enough on foreign policy to let them get away with it. There's a reason no previous U.S. presidents have had a N. Korea summit. The conventional wisdom is that the Kim dynasty is little more than tin-pot dictators, and the developed world has largely avoided letting them come to the international table on that basis. Sure, you may write that off as childish; I'm not advocating the policy. But the interpretations I'm seeing out there is that Kim Jong Un will finally get the "I'm an international player" feather in his cap by luring Trump into a summit for his own prestige. He knows he can play on Trump's self-image as the consummate dealmaker to make him think he's the first president ever to sit down with N. Korea.

Bottom line; I have no faith that N. Korea will actually denuclearize, although I think they'll dangle that as a carrot, and maybe even commit to it. There, that's my prediction.

As a matter of fact PartSkeptic's only outstanding prediction of the bunch we've been monitoring on this thread is

Quote:

6. The North Korean nuclear threat will be ended by 12th August 2018.

Obviously that was predicted as the end result of a sequence of events which started with Trump nuking NK but, strictly speaking, if NK does denuclearise in the next 5 months he could actually claim a hit. That would only increase his hit rate from 0% to 17%, though, so still not exactly impressive.

__________________"If you trust in yourself ... and believe in your dreams ... and follow your star ... you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things" - Terry Pratchett

Location: stranded at Buenos Aires, a city that, like NYC or Paris, has so little to offer...

Posts: 8,878

Or the age old Jeane Dixon effect...

__________________Horrible dipsomaniacs and other addicts, be gone and get treated, or covfefe your soul!These fora are full of scientists and specialists. Most of them turn back to pumpkins the second they log out.I got tired of the actual schizophrenics that are taking hold part of the forum and decided to do something about it.

Or rather, your predictions are about normal for a reasonably intelligent, reasonably informed person. That's nothing to be ashamed of in the least -- but yeah, don't quit your day job.

Personally I don't believe the ruse. N. Korea has done this sort of thing before: hold out an olive branch and lure people into concessions, then fail to keep up their end of the bargain. I think that they think they've finally found a U.S. administration naive enough on foreign policy to let them get away with it. There's a reason no previous U.S. presidents have had a N. Korea summit. The conventional wisdom is that the Kim dynasty is little more than tin-pot dictators, and the developed world has largely avoided letting them come to the international table on that basis. Sure, you may write that off as childish; I'm not advocating the policy. But the interpretations I'm seeing out there is that Kim Jong Un will finally get the "I'm an international player" feather in his cap by luring Trump into a summit for his own prestige. He knows he can play on Trump's self-image as the consummate dealmaker to make him think he's the first president ever to sit down with N. Korea.

Bottom line; I have no faith that N. Korea will actually denuclearize, although I think they'll dangle that as a carrot, and maybe even commit to it. There, that's my prediction.

Kim and Putin are the kinds of leaders Trump wants to be. He admires people who can simply kill the people who cause them grief.

That admission shows a level of self awareness and analysis that many people never achieve. It can take a lot of bravery to admit you were wrong.

Well done.

I am going to go further. Trump won because the USA wanted an anti-politician and I (and many others) like that. I still agree with a number of his positions including wanting to get out of the Middle East, making peace there, and becoming friends with Russia. The Deep State and the media will not let him.

Lately Trump is busy doing things that I think will lead to WW3. North Korea and Iran. And moving the US embassy to Jerusalem.

In the last month I was beginning to wonder if he is not the Anti-Christ the Christians speak off as a Sign of End Times!

A Christian told me tonight that the US recognition of Jerusalem fulfills the Biblical prophecy of end times.

“At this point, Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel is the only concrete thing that his evangelical supporters can point to as part of fulfilling biblical prophecy to bring about the second coming of Christ,” religion historian Neil Young told Newsweek in January.

That reads like an indictment, but it’s safe to say that for those eagerly anticipating the Second Coming, any progress is welcome. And the move on Monday is apparently seen by many evangelicals as precisely such a step.

__________________**Agnostic theist. God/Satan/Angels/Demons may not exist - but I choose to think the probability is that they do. By personal experience.**

It's difficult to tell, since PartSkeptic follows a sort of motte-and-bailey strategy. He'll walk right up to the conclusion he wants drawn, but then deny having explicitly drawn it and retreat back to a position of relative strength. Depending on what point he's at in that process, his arguments may seem like they're both coming and going.

As an aside, I really don't care for debates that rely on such a strategy. It's fundamentally dishonest, in my opinion, to argue pointedly in one direction and then deny the apparent destination. Rhetorically, it baits what is then made to look like a straw-man argument, generally for no more noble a purpose than to be a pretext for accusing the opponent of shady tactics.

Give me an example specifically.

I am not dishonest so you can throw that bit of mudslinging at the wall.

There are two aspects to prediction - one is vague because of lack of precision but the broader picture remains the same. You seem unable to differentiate the two.

Example. A tank is moving towards us. It will get here shortly if it keeps going at its present speed. The arrival may be delayed by all sort of things but the direction and the arrival seem to be predictable.

Oh, and aren't we the larney toffee-nosed upper-class looking down on the trash!

__________________**Agnostic theist. God/Satan/Angels/Demons may not exist - but I choose to think the probability is that they do. By personal experience.**

No, I'm not going to scour the thread for documentation to something I wrote as a broad summary two months ago in a thread I've largely now forgotten. Had you been here to ask me when I was thinking of it, things might have been different. What do your Tarot cards say I was thinking back in March?

If you let up on the invective, I might be persuaded to re-read the thread and find an example. But not today.

Quote:

I am not dishonest so you can throw that bit of mudslinging at the wall.

"Wah! I'm being so badly treated!"

Quote:

There are two aspects to prediction - one is vague because of lack of precision but the broader picture remains the same. You seem unable to differentiate the two.

Actually I'm quite able, and I'm quite able to recognize ham-fisted attempts at equivocation when I see them.

Quote:

Example. A tank is moving towards us. It will get here shortly if it keeps going at its present speed. The arrival may be delayed by all sort of things but the direction and the arrival seem to be predictable.

Uniform motion is easily and unremarkably predictable from Newtonian dynamics. And if, as you suggest, the tank crew stops for an hour to have their lunch and you didn't know they were going to do that, your prediction will be wrong because uniform motion was not maintained. What you seem to want is credit for the prediction if the tank gets there anyway an hour later than you predicted, or gets somewhere at the time you did predict, or another vehicle drives by and distracts you. You're using the uncertainty in ordinary predictive reasoning to excuse your failure to exercise a supernatural prescience. You don't get to claim to be prescient unless you can see more of the unexpected changes in variables than chance would predict. You can't, so you don't get the claim.

Quote:

Oh, and aren't we the larney toffee-nosed upper-class looking down on the trash!

"Wah! My critics are such horrible people!"

Give it rest. If you have something substantive to say, stay here and say it. But your incessant whining is tedious and off-putting.

In the last month I was beginning to wonder if he is not the Anti-Christ the Christians speak off as a Sign of End Times!

No, because the Anti-Christ and the End Times are just stories made up by profoundly ignorant, superstitious people who actually had no supernatural prophetic ability whatsoever, because there's no such thing.

__________________"If you trust in yourself ... and believe in your dreams ... and follow your star ... you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things" - Terry Pratchett

When the mad Emperor Caligula declared himself to be God and then wanted a statue of himself to be erected in the Temple as an object of worship, Jews went bananas. Even for Trump's extreme Zionist supporters I think self deification in a rebuilt Temple would be over the top.

Unfortunately the percentage of wilfully ignorant, absurdly credulous woo slingers is even higher on most other forums.

__________________"If you trust in yourself ... and believe in your dreams ... and follow your star ... you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things" - Terry Pratchett

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